Getting Out of Guantánamo: One Down, 87 Cleared Detainees to Go

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Getting out of Guantánamo is such a feat these days (with just three men released in the last 18 months) that it is remarkable that Ibrahim al-Qosi, a Sudanese prisoner who agreed to a plea deal
at his war crimes trial in Guantánamo in July 2010, guaranteeing that
he would be freed after two years, has been repatriated as promised. 168
prisoners now remain in Guantánamo.

With a typical disregard for the principle that a prisoner — any
prisoner — must be freed when their sentence comes to an end, the US has
maintained, since the “war on terror” began nearly 11 years ago, that
prisoners at Guantánamo can continue to be held after their sentence has
come to an end, and be returned to the general population as “enemy
combatants,” even though President Bush failed to do this when he had
the opportunity — with Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden who was freed after serving a five-month sentence handed down after his military trial in 2008.

A source with knowledge of al-Qosi’s case, who does not wish to be
identified, told me that the Obama administration was unwilling to
detain al-Qosi after his sentence came to an end, and I believe that one
of the reasons that the President negotiated a waiver
to the provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act, allowing
him to bypass restrictions on releasing prisoners that were imposed by
Congress, was to prevent Republicans from trying to force him to
continue holding al-Qosi.

This, it should be noted, is not out of kindness.

Al-Qosi’s plea deal
— preventing him from serving 14 years, as decided at his trial — has
been used in Guantánamo to encourage other prisoners to accept plea
deals, in exchange for providing the authorities with information they
can use against other prisoners. If al-Qosi had not been freed, it would
have derailed a plan that is already on shaky ground, because of the
Canadian government’s refusal to repatriate Omar Khadr, who also accepted a plea deal,
in October 2010, which was supposed to guarantee that, after one more
year in Guantánamo, he would be returned to Canada to serve the rest of
an eight-year sentence in his homeland.

As Carol Rosenberg, who broke the story in the Miami Herald,
explained, Khadr’s presence at Guantánamo, eight months after he was
supposed to have left the prison, “has meant that prosecution plea deal
offers have fallen on deaf ears.” Al-Qosi’s release, in contrast, “may
break a logjam in plea deals attributed to the Khadr case.” Marine Col.
Jeffrey Colwell, the chief defense counsel for the military commissions,
told Rosenberg, “Clearly if the government can’t carry through on their
end of the bargain, it has a chilling effect on the willingness of
others to plead.”

For al-Qosi, his release will allow him to be reunited with his
family. Unlike many other prisoners, all of his immediate family are
still alive. As Paul Reichler, his Washington-based civilian attorney,
who represented him pro bono for seven years, explained, “He is
now in his 50s, eager only to spend his life at home with his family in
Sudan — his mother and father, his wife and two teenage daughters, and
his brothers and their families — and live among them in peace, quiet
and freedom.”

His Pentagon-appointed defense lawyer, Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier,
noted that, last week, al-Qosi was moved to “special quarters,” with “a
flat-screen TV, a refrigerator that let him eat at his leisure and a
small outdoor gravel-topped patio, all inside a locked enclosure.” Cmdr.
Lachelier added there was also “a real bed rather than a steel bunk
topped with a mat,” but that al-Qosi slept on the floor before leaving
“because he suffers from a bad back.”

Although al-Qosi is technically a convicted war criminal, this says
more about the distortions introduced by the United States after 9/11
than it does about al-Qosi himself. He was seized in December 2001,
escaping from the Tora Bora mountains, where a showdown had taken place
between al-Qaeda and the Taliban on the one hand, and the United States
and their proxy Afghan army on the other, but there was no indication
that he held any kind of leadership position. He was seized with other
men who were later described as being bodyguards for Osama bin Laden,
but those are largely discredited allegations, made by prisoners notorious for making false statements about their fellow inmates.

Al-Qosi was a trained accountant, who had been the book-keeper for
one of the businesses that Osama bin Laden ran in Sudan during his stay
in al-Qosi’s homeland between 1992 and 1996, and he then followed bin
Laden to Afghanistan, but he was never anything more than a peripheral
figure, sometimes working as a driver for bin Laden (like Salim Hamdan),
and sometimes cooking at an al-Qaeda compound named Star of Jihad, in
Jalalabad.

As Carol Rosenberg noted, he was also one of the first prisoners “to
formally allege torture,” including “the use of strobe lights, sleep
deprivation, sexual humiliation, [and] being wrapped in the Israeli
flag,” in a petition filed in federal court in 2004, although that was
not revealed publicly at the time, and he had to drop all allegations
about his torture and abuse as part of his plea deal.

With his long ordeal behind him, al-Qosi will return to his hometown,
Atbara, north of Khartoum, where he will help to run his family’s shop.
His wife, Mariam, the daughter of another former Guantánamo prisoner, Abdullah Tabarak,
a Moroccan released in July 2003, who he married in Afghanistan before
the 9/11 attacks, moved to Atbara from Morocco last year, with their
daughters, to await his return.

Summing up his client, Paul Reichler said, “He is an intelligent,
pious, humble and sincere individual who has endured much hardship the
past 10 years. But he returns home without hatred or rancor.”

In conclusion, while it is reassuring that the Obama administration
has honoured its agreement to release al-Qosi, it remains deeply
dispiriting that 87 other men — never charged, never tried and cleared for release up to eight years ago
— are still held. New homes are required for some of these men who
cannot be safely repatriated, because they are from countries where they
would be unsafe if returned — China, for example,
or Syria — but 58 of them are Yemenis, held because of an unjust and
hysterical response to would-be underwear bomber Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab’s capture in December 2009.

When it was revealed that Abdulmutallab had been recruited in Yemen, President Obama responded by issuing a moratorium on releasing any more Yemenis,
which has stayed in place ever since, even though not releasing Yemenis
— some cleared as long ago as 2004 — is nothing less than guilt by
nationality, and a disgrace that, unfortunately, no one in a position of
power and authority wishes to address.